To me, this movie is perfection.

Excellent but underrated film

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Come with me to the wonderful world of 60s spy fiction. Emboldened by the success of the Bond books and movies (Fleming wrote his novels on the beach, literally, with hunt and peck typing) the world enjoyed the greatest variety of spy fiction ever seen, present day included. Two of the most popular and critically-praised tomes, the Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton, and the consummately perfect Jonas Wilde series by Andrew York, were serially destroyed by producers who were more interested in showing how clever they were than trying to capture the essence of the story. Jonas Wilde, as written, was a spy so well drawn that, in a showdown, you might pick him over Bond. No gadgets, no women, just a physical zeal to get the job done, and a rare (perfected) judo move which allowed him to kill with one blow (most of the time, often his back went out which reduced him to a mere mortal). This was the one and only attempt to bring Wilde to the screen, based on The Eliminator (one of the Wilde series, they are all excellent) and it is nothing short of wretched. Badly written, badly directed, showing no appreciation for the uniqueness of the character, and the lead actor so badly miscast that you wonder if he ever stopped mugging for the camera long enough to actually put some personality into his role. A travesty.

I sought out this movie for one reason ... it has Carol Lynley in it. I first saw her when I was 14, she was a teenager in 1959's 'Blue Denim', a risqué teen pregnancy movie, but I just had the biggest crush on her. Something about her, her face, the way she moves, the way she delivers lines, to me she was the epitome of the girl you wanted to date.Anyway lots of years have passed, neither of us are young anymore, but it is fun to re-visit those memories.In this movie, set and filmed in England, Brit Richard Johnson is agent Jonas Wilde with a license to kill. And in fact he does kill a few targets. Sort of a poor man's James Bond without all the gadgets. But as the story develops he learns that he has become a target of his own organization, and he has to use his cunning to survive.His American girlfriend is Carol Lynley as Jocelyn . She doesn't have a large role, but an important one. She is pretty much the same girl as in 'Blue Denim', just about 8 years older.I enjoyed it as light entertainment, as a 'blast from the past', but it is nothing more than a 'B' movie.SPOILERS: As Jonas begins to learn of the plot against him, he is told someone very close to him is keeping an eye on him. He figures out correctly that it is Jocelyn and in their final encounter at the apartment they shared, she tries to poison him via ice he always uses for his drink, but he is wary, puts a cube in the fish tank instead, the fish die but he doesn't, and he is forced to kill her by breaking her neck.

Some years back, I had recorded this (on VHS) off the MGM cable channel but the reception had been so poor I did not make it through the film; eventually, I upgraded to a decent copy – albeit also sourced from MGM and, thus, panned-and-scanned! Anyway, I decided to check this out now (and the two remaining unwatched films from this promising but short-lived director) as a follow-up to star Richard Johnson's recently-viewed appearances – in the same mould – as Bulldog Drummond but also in anticipation of two upcoming Holt revisits in my ongoing tribute to the late Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster. Still, unlike those two lightweight spy films, this is anything but campy or glossy; in fact, typical of most Cold War espionage yarns of its era (equating realism with glumness), the plot is fairly obscure, so that the result proves oddly unmemorable despite careful work all around!It is therefore up to an impressive cast (in uniformly fine form) to deliver the goods and keep one watching: Johnson, Carol Lynley (as his two-timing girlfriend who tries to poison him at the end – but her fish get it instead! – and whom he fells with a karate chop!), Barbara Bouchet (as an initially suspicious addition to the spy ring but who ultimately emerges a heroic trooper and even loses her life to the 'cause'), Harry Andrews (as Johnson's suave superior), Gordon Jackson (as the hero's seemingly laid-back skipper-partner but who turns out to be opportunistic, duplicitous and sadistic), Sylvia Syms (as Andrews' nagging wife who gets abducted on a train by Johnson), Diana Dors (as a housekeeper to a defecting scientist seduced by Johnson in the guise of a salesman), Sam Wanamaker (as the C.I.A.'s top man dubbed "Lucinda" and Bouchet's boss) and Maurice Denham (as Johnson's elderly team-mate whose murder starts the ball rolling).The film opens in a movie theater where one is given to understand that Johnson will himself be eliminated by his own side once he completes his next mission, but this does not happen (having discovered the mole in their organization) but is nonetheless kept on a leash by the umbrella-carrying Andrews in the freeze-frame finale (incidentally, Holt's start as an editor at Ealing Studios is much in evidence here as the film's pacing is very tight, with scenes hardly being allowed to finish off or permitted to start gradually)! Apparently, Johnson was Terence Young's first choice to play James Bond but, as I said earlier, his world-weary 'eliminator' (the title of the original source novel) here is closer to the austerity of Harry Palmer. Johnson and Bouchet were once a romantic item and, as it happens, they probably both owe their popularity in cult movie circles today to Italian film-maker Lucio Fulci via, respectively, ZOMBIE (1979) and DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING (1972)! Interestingly enough, Holt (who worked for Hammer 3 times) is here employed by their main rivals, Amicus; for the record, he had already dabbled in the spy world by directing episodes of TV's DANGER MAN (1960-61) and ESPIONAGE (1964). The film under review – which the director apparently dismissed as "dreadful" and claimed he only made it because he "needed the bread"! – is Holt's final completed work (in the U.S. it was unceremoniously released as a double-feature, incongruously paired with Paul Wendkos' second-rate war movie ATTACK ON THE IRON COAST {1968}!), since alcoholism got the better of him…dying at the young age of 47 two-thirds of the way through shooting Hammer's superior BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1971)!; even so, Johnson later named him one of the best taskmasters he ever worked for.

Based on the novel `The Eliminator' by Andrew York, this deeply cynical look at the spy game is one of the unsung gems of the genre. It would be the only spy feature film in director Seth Holt's short career although he had worked on the `Danger Man' and `Espionage' television series previously. Holt would start one more film, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (71) but he wouldn't finish it.This is one of those movies where everyone's motives are suspect and should be for good reasons. Hardly anyone is who they seem to be and if indeed they are genuine, they end up as dead as the straw men in the end. There are many levels to Danger Route, all working to subvert our expectations as well as those of Jonas Wilde (Richard Johnson), the agent caught in the middle of the power plays going on around him.Understandably, Wilde would like to escape the game and even hands in his resignation during the course of the film. Naturally we know this is impossible. Even Whitehall is not above using a little blackmail to get their way. The freeze-frame of Wilde at the end of the film tells us that his predicament is as unchanging as that of the Cold War politics surrounding him.